sohcahto...@gmail.com: > On Monday, June 27, 2016 at 7:09:35 AM UTC-7, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: >> Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwa...@gmail.com>: >> > Were there other languages that did something similar? >> >> In XML, whitespace between tags is significant unless the document type >> says otherwise. On the other hand, leading and trailing space in >> attribute values is insignificant unless the document type says >> otherwise. >> >> > Why would a language designer think it a good idea? >> > >> > Did the poor sod who wrote the compiler think it was a good idea? >> >> Fortran is probably not too hard to parse. XML, on the other hand, is >> impossible to parse without the document type at hand. The document type >> not only defines the whitespace semantics but also the availability and >> meaning of the "entities" (e.g., © for ©). Add namespaces to that, >> and the mess is complete. > > XML isn't a programming language. I don't think it's relevant to the > conversation.
The question was about (formal) languages, not only programming languages. However, there are programming languages with XML syntax: <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSLT> <URL: http://www.o-xml.org/spec/langspec.html> <URL: http://xplusplus.sourceforge.net/> Marko -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
